Tevatron collider waves goodbye to the Higgs

As the world waits on tenterhooks for a Higgs boson result from the Large Hadron Collider, the last great US particle smasher has made its final contribution to the hunt.

The Tevatron, which ran from March 2001 to last September at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, reported today that it has seen hints of the long-sought particle - but not enough to be certain it's really there.

Now, having analysed more than 500 trillion collisions seen over more
than a decade, the Tevatron has its final results: if it exists, the
Higgs particle has a mass between 115 and 135 GeV, or about 130 times
the mass of the proton.

That's consistent with what the LHC has reportedly been seeing. But
because the Higgs is spotted not on its own, but by the detritus it
leaves behind when it decays, the two machines are sensitive to
different particles. The Tevatron worked best for Higgses that decayed
into two bottom quarks, while the LHC has a better view of Higgses
decaying into two photons. Theory predicts that a 125 GeV Higgs will
decay into two photons more often, giving the LHC an edge.

"Our data strongly point toward the existence of the Higgs boson, but it
will take results from the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in
Europe to establish a discovery," said Fermilab's Rob Roser, a spokesperson for the CDF experiment.

2 Comments

Its an excellent work by the scientist team....
I just want to know if the Higgs Boson, which lives only for a few micro seconds has a mass ranging between 115 - 135, vanishes after giving its mass to the sub-atomic particles ?
If so, can you say that Higgs is the reason for elementary particles to occur ?

Jeremy Hunter
on July 3, 2012 10:19 AM

Thank you, New Scientist, for not using that damned layman's name for the Higgs boson for the entirety of this article.

The less it is used, eventually it will die out and people will refer to it by its proper name, the Higgs boson - and people won't be fooled into thinking that this particle is somehow related to the existence of God (I have come across people who have been confused by the name and think it is proving God's existence).